One of the horror genre's "most widely read critics" (Rue Morgue # 68), "an accomplished film journalist" (Comic Buyer's Guide #1535), and the award-winning author of Horror Films of the 1980s (2007), The Rock and Roll Film Encyclopedia (2007) and Horror Films of the 1970s (2002), John Kenneth Muir, presents his blog on film, television and nostalgia, named one of the Top 100 Film Studies Blog on the Net.

Tuesday, September 12, 2017

Breakaway Day 2017: "The Full Circle"

The
reconnaissance team on Eagle 6 has not reported back from the forested planet
of Retha.

Commander Koenig (Martin
Landau) orders Paul Morrow (Prentis Hancock) to retrieve the craft by remote
control. When the ship is explored at
Moonbase Alpha, a primitive cave-man is discovered dead in the passenger
module. He is the ship's only occupant.

Koenig
orders a full-scale rescue mission to the planet, unaware that a mysterious
mist found on the planet surface is actually a time warp of sorts.

When the Alphans step through the fog, they
are re-made as primitive cave-people. As a primitive man, Koenig becomes Cave Chief,
while Helena Russell becomes the tribal healer, and the Chief’s consort.

Unaware
of what has happened to her fellow Alphans, data analyst Sandra Benes (Zienia Merton)
encounters several cave people, who capture her and bring her back to the
cave. There, a primitive hunter (Oliver
Cotton) and the Cave Chief battle for ownership of the beautiful and strange
female in their midst.

On
Alpha, Dr. Mathias (Anton Phillips) solves the alien riddle during an autopsy. The caveman in the Eagle has caps on his
teeth.

He is one of the Alphans, not an
inhabitant of Retha…

“The
Full Circle” is likely not one of the better-regarded episodes of Space:
1999’s (1975-1977) Year One. And
yet, it is an episode that I like very much, and for two key reasons.

First,
the episode is set mostly in natural, real environs, and that fact gives the
story a remarkable boost in terms of visuals and excitement. The planet Retha is a combination of Black
Park and Pinewood Studios back-lot exterior locations, and the contrast between
sterile, technological Moonbase Alpha and such natural, wild locales is
remarkable.

You
could not recreate the “primordial” look and feel of Retha on an interior
sound-stage, using papier mache rocks, nor, truthfully, by using a familiar So
Cal location.

To American eyes,
therefore, “The Full Circle” looks genuinely like a journey to the prehistoric
era, to a wild, untamed world. Director Bob Kellett’s camera-work
is also remarkable, especially during the pursuit of Sandra by the cave-man
Alphans.

Secondly,
the episode’s thematic framework works very successfully. Specifically, "The Full Circle" ponders the
(unchanging?) nature of humanity. It compares turn-of-the-millennium, space-age
Alphans to Stone Age counterparts, and finds few meaningful differences.

To wit: Sandra Benes (Zienia Merton) nearly bludgeons
Commander Koenig (as cave man) to death with a rock. And Alan Carter (Nick Tate) literally goes “cave-man,”
vengeful and hungry for blood when he worries that Sandra has been injured. These are the acts of rational, modern human beings?

As
the episode’s coda suggests, the narrative is really about basic human
emotions, about human instincts. Sandra
still acts by fight-or-flight dictates, for example, and this means that she is
not far removed, in terms of nature, from the Cave Chief who -- in a manner very
unlike Commander Koenig -- desires her.

As
Koenig notes “it was only us there,” and the point is made. In 40,000 years,
according to the episode’s timeline, man has not really evolved beyond savagery,
beyond jealousy, rage, and other primitive emotions. Those things still drive us, sometimes to survival, sometimes to disaster.

One
scene suggests the similarities visually.

At around the half-way point of the episode, we meet Alan, Victor and
Kano huddled around a camp-fire, getting ready to turn in for the night.

In the very next scene, we see the interior
of the tribe’s cave, where a camp-fire is also at the center of the
population, at the center of civilization. The costumes have changed --
from Rudi Gernreich 1999 chic to primitive furs -- but man has not. He still needs fire. He still huddles with
his fellow humans in the dark. And he
still doesn’t understand all the mysteries of nature, and the universe.

Where
“The Full Circle” vexes some critics and viewers, I suppose, is in the story
mechanism that makes the comparison between primitive man and space age man
possible. Here, a swirling mist is a
time warp that changes Koenig, Helena and other Alphans from civilized to
primitive. Even their clothes change with them.

The
time warp mist is a solid device for making the story’s point, but leaves a lot
of questions unanswered.

How do the
Alphan’s change costumes in the mist?
How does the time warp achieve that end? Does all the mist on the planet
act in this fashion, or only in this one spot?
Is the time warp naturally occurring, a function of “nature” on Retha,
or is it something that was designed by unseen inhabitants?

Personally,
it doesn’t bother me that Space: 1999 fails to address such
questions. I prefer to speculate, and
have always felt that the time warp is some device or entity left behind the planet’s
inhabitants.

Perhaps they created it because they foresaw the end of their race, and wanted to go back to the
beginning...get a second chance. Or perhaps they left it behind on Retha to preserve the planet’s natural, unspoiled nature. Any visitors would lose the capacity to alter
the planet’s climate or terrain if reverted to primitive form.

In
the end, the details don’t really matter a whole lot, and it is what “The Full
Circle” states about human nature that is valuable, and memorable. When you combine that statement with the
beautiful location work, the episode emerges as one that is less disposable, and
far more intriguing. Barry Gray's score is also one of his most unusual contributions, and underlines the action brilliantly.

Also,
as is the case in many Year One stories (and “Earthbound’s” coda is an
example), “The Full Circle” gains interest and suspense from a twist in the
tale.

It is learned, late in the story,
that the cave-man in Eagle 6 is actually an Alphan. Specifically, he has caps on his teeth. This information changes the whole nature of the story on the first
watch. Before this reveal, it is a
natural assumption that the Alphans have encountered a world of primitive man.

In fact, as Mathias's discovery suggests, they have encountered only
themselves at a different stage of development.
That twist is a surprising one, and like the device of the misty
time-warp, makes the final point about humanity’s unchanging nature, all the
more powerful.

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About John

award-winning author of 27 books including Horror Films FAQ (2013), Horror Films of the 1990s (2011), Horror Films of the 1980s (2007), TV Year (2007), The Rock and Roll Film Encyclopedia (2007), Mercy in Her Eyes: The Films of Mira Nair (2006),, Best in Show: The Films of Christopher Guest and Company (2004), The Unseen Force: The Films of Sam Raimi (2004), An Askew View: The Films of Kevin Smith (2002), The Encyclopedia of Superheroes on Film & Television (2004), Exploring Space:1999 (1997), An Analytical Guide to TV's Battlestar Galactica (1998), Terror Television (2001), Space:1999 - The Forsaken (2003) and Horror Films of the 1970s (2002).

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